Great frauds in history: Victor Jacobowitz’s phony account

Victor Jacobowitz fiddled the inventory records of his health and beauty products business and defrauded investors out of €177m.

Victor Jacobowitz © Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg via Getty Images

(Image credit: Victor Jacobowitz © Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Victor Jacobowitz (pictured, centre) was born in New York in 1932. He took over Allou Healthcare with two of his sons, Herman and Jacob, in 1985, before floating it on the stock exchange four years later. In the three decades following the purchase, the Jacobowitzes built it up into one of the largest distributors of health and beauty products in the United States, with a particular focus on perfume. By 2002, Allou reported net income of $6.6m on sales of $564m and employed more than 300 people, with warehouses in New York, Florida and California.

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri